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While there may be plenty of romantic ways on honeymoon to demonstrate love with the minimum of words, daily life would be near impossible without being able to speak the same language. Daily love will be impossible if we never find out and learn our partner’s primary love language (and quite possibly their second and third too).
Our tendency can be to try to show love in the way we like to receive it and to be surprised when our partner doesn’t appreciate our efforts.
Nicky:
I have come to realise that time and touch convey love most powerfully for Sila while words and actions are most important for me. So I find it relatively easy to show Sila love through my words and my actions, but they have proved ineffective if I am not using the love languages that are most important to her.
One particular Saturday, just after we had received several boxes of books from Sila’s late father and had nowhere to put them, we decided to spend the day going to IKEA, buying a bookshelf system and putting it up. I felt rather resentful about the whole exercise as I was fairly sure Sila was unlikely to open the books, let alone read them. However, I recognised they held emotional value for her.
When we got home, we divided the job between us. Sila was in one room sorting through the books and I was in another trying to put the shelves together, which took me considerably longer than I had anticipated. But, while I worked, I was thinking that I was doing this for Sila so it was worth the effort.
Finally, at about 10 p.m., I finished and was feeling rather pleased with my handiwork, when Sila came in and failed to say anything encouraging at all about the shelves, which left me feeling very hurt as affirming words are so important for me.
Sila:
We hadn’t talked about it, but I was hoping we’d be finished in time to at least have dinner together. So, I was feeling very grumpy with Nicky, not because I didn’t appreciate his hard work, but because we hadn’t spent any of the afternoon or evening with each other, and spending time together is so important for me to feel loved and to feel good.
Having found out what makes our partner feel loved, we must then decide to act on our discovery. It may seem unnatural at first and, as with learning a foreign language, it will require time, determination and a great deal of practice. Some have grown up in homes where there has been little or no physical affection and they will not naturally and spontaneously give this to their partner. But this expression of love can be learnt. And it will be essential to do so if this is the way our husband or wife feels loved. Others have not heard loving, affirming words being spoken during their upbringing. In this case, if this is particularly important to their partner, they will need to practise this way of showing love. As they do so they will become increasingly fluent.
In the next few blogs, we will share in detail about these five expressions of love because we know from our own experience that, in its simplicity, it is a profound and far-reaching principle, which any couple can utilise for the strengthening and well-being of their relationship. Numerous couples we know are still very much ‘in love’ many years after the initial infatuation has worn off because they have a thousand times each year shown love to their partner in the particular way that he or she understands it best.
Some couples never discover what makes their partner feel loved. They may study each other but with the wrong intention – they are looking to criticise rather than to find out each other’s needs. In a short story, ‘The Eyes of Love’, we read about an American couple, Kenneth and Shannon, who are in their car driving home after a family party.
Before he can suppress it, anger rises like a kind of heat in the bones of his face. ‘Okay, what is it?’ he says . . .
She doesn’t answer right away. ‘I’m tired,’ she tells him without quite turning to look at him.
‘No, really,’ he says. ‘I want to hear it. Come on, let it out.’
Now she does turn. ‘I told you this morning. I just don’t like hearing the same stories all the time.’
‘They aren’t all the same,’ he says, feeling unreasonably angry.
‘Oh, of course they are . . . Your mother deserves a medal.’
‘I like them. Mom likes them. Everybody likes them. Your father and your sisters like them.’
‘Over and over,’ she mutters, looking away again. ‘I just want to go to sleep.’
‘You know what your problem is?’ he says, ‘You’re a critic. That’s what your problem is. Everything is something for you to evaluate and decide on. Even me. Especially me.’
‘You,’ she says.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Me. Because this isn’t about my father at all. It’s about us.’
According to Kenneth, she has looked upon the evening and his father’s storytelling in the same way as she looks upon him: as a critic. The conversation continues:
He’s quiet a moment, but the anger is still working in him. ‘You know the trouble with you?’ he says. ‘You don’t see anything with love. You only see it with your brain.’
‘Whatever you say,’ she tells him.
‘Everything’s locked up in your brain,’ he says, taking a long drag of the cigarette and then putting it out in the ashtray.
He starts the car. ‘You know those people that live behind us?’ he says. The moment has become almost philosophical to him.
She stares at him with her wet eyes, and just now he feels quite powerful and happy.
‘Do you?’ he demands.
‘Of course I do.’
‘Well, I was watching them the other day. The way he is with the yard – right? We’ve been making such fun of him all summer. We’ve been so smart about his obsession with weeds and trimming and the grass.’
‘I guess it’s really important that we talk about these people now,’ she says.
‘I’m telling you something you need to hear,’ Kenneth says.
‘I don’t want to hear it now,’ she says. ‘I’ve been listening to talk all day. I’m tired of talk.’
And Kenneth is shouting at her. ‘I’ll just say this and then I’ll shut up for the rest of the year if that’s what you want!’
She says nothing.
‘I’m telling you about these people. The man was walking around with a little plastic baggie on one hand, picking up the dog’s droppings. Okay? And his wife was trimming one of her shrubs. She was trimming one of the shrubs and I thought for a second I could feel what she was thinking. There wasn’t anything in her face, but I was so smart, like we are, you know, Shannon. I was so smart about it that I knew what she was thinking. I was so perceptive about these people we don’t even know. These people we’re too snobbish to speak to.’
‘You’re the one who makes fun of them,’ Shannon says.
‘Let me finish,’ he says. ‘I saw the guy’s wife look at him from the other side of the yard, and it was like I could hear the words in her mind: “He’s picking up the dog droppings again. I can’t stand it another minute.” You know? But that wasn’t what she was thinking. Because she walked over in a little while and helped him – actually pointed out a couple of places he’d missed. And then the two of them walked into their house arm in arm with their dog droppings. You see what I’m saying, Shannon? That woman was looking at him with love. She didn’t see what I saw – there wasn’t any criticism in it.’
Finally, Kenneth and Shannon stop arguing.
The fight’s over. They’ve made up. She reaches across and gives his forearm a little affectionate squeeze. He takes her hand and squeezes back. Then he has both hands on the wheel again. Their apartment house is in sight now, down the street to the left. He turns to look at her, his wife, here in the shadowed and watery light, and then he quickly looks back at the road. It comes to him like a kind of fright that in the little idle moment of his gaze some part of him was marking the unpleasant downturn of her mouth, the chiselled, too sharp curve of her jaw – the whole dishevelled, vaguely tattered look of her – as though he were a stranger, someone unable to imagine what anyone, another man, other men, someone like himself, could see in her to love.[1]
As the story ends, we realise that, unlike the husband and the wife who live behind their house, Kenneth and Shannon have become each other’s critics. We reap what we sow. ‘You don’t see anything with love,’ Kenneth said. But then nor does he look at her with love. In a world full of critics, we are called as husband and wife to study each other, not with critical eyes, but with the eyes of love, searching for what our partner needs to make them feel loved and special.
Gary Chapman underlines the importance: ‘When you feel loved in the relationship, it’s easier to process all the rest of life because the need for love, the emotional need for love, is the deepest emotional need we have as humans.’[2]
Over the next few blogs, we shall describe each of the five expressions of love. As we do so, ask yourself the following three questions:
• Do I regularly express love in this way?
• How important is this expression of love for my husband or wife to feel loved?
• How important is this expression of love for me?
It is easy to expect our husband or wife to know instinctively about our needs and then to get hurt when they fail to meet them. We all tend to express love in the way that we like to receive it. Despite our good intentions, this will not work if our partner has different needs from our own.
We can let our marriage tick over. Or we can take the opportunity to have the best possible marriage. If we are to have a real sense of intimacy and a true enjoyment of each other, we must study one another with the eyes of love, and then use our words, our actions, our time, our money and our body to communicate our love effectively.
[1] Richard Bausch, Excerpts from ‘The Eyes of Love’ from The Stories of Richard Bausch, pp. 258–9, 261–2, 264. Copyright © 2003 by Richard Bausch. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
[2] Gary Chapman, interview for The Marriage Course © Alpha International 2020. Used with permission.
